Website Optimisation Tips

When optimising your website, there are a few basic issues that you should have in place, we have posted a few of these basic issues that may be helpful to you: Google vs. SEO’s,

· Optimising Content

· Keyword Optimisation

· URL Canonicalization

· Optimisation of TAGS - title-tag, meta-tags, header-tags (h1 tags), image-alt-tags and formatting-tags

· Keyword Density

· Header Tags

· Text Formatting

· Text Close to Top Left

· Key Phrases

· Alt Text

· Incoming Links

· SEO Tools

Google vs. SEO’s

Major search-engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo are in constant competition to deliver the best results for their users. Search-engines regularly change the algorithms they use to determine the relevancy and importance of your site.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are constantly changing and even then, many SEO agencies disagree on the actual specifics required to optimise a website.

There are only a few things that SEO’s generally agree on:
Content is important, inbound links are even more important and that the SEO landscape is constantly changes.

Optimising Content

The page content needs to be optimised so that both search engine visitors and human visitors both deem it to be a useful website. Once upon a time, effective optimisation entailed stuff content with as many keywords as possible and while this once generated good search engine results it invariably put visitors off when they found the contents were irrelevant. It is also now frowned upon and penalised as being "spam" by all of the major search engines.

Search engines algorithms

Search engines use specific algorithms to determine the relevance of your website.

The calculations from these algorithms determine where on the search engine result pages your website will appear. In order to keep the SEO’s from calculating aspects of their algorithms and ensuring that results are always up to date, major search engines regularly update their search algorithms.

The result of some of the most recent algorithms updates has seen the shift move away from optimising websites for search-engines and instead the algorithms focus on promoting websites that give their searchers the best user experience. They're not only changing, they are evolving into more intelligent and accurate algorithms. SEO should still focus on optimizing their websites for specific keywords, but a rule of thumb should be to think of the end user experience as when building web pages.

Page Menu:
Keyword optimisation, URL Canonicalization
Optimisation of TAGS (title-tag, meta-tags, h1 header-tags, image-alt-tags and formatting-tags)
Keyword Density, Header Tags, Text Formatting, Text Close to Top
Key Phrases , Alt Text, Incoming Links and SEO Tools.

Keyword optimisation

Keyword optimisation is now more heavily watched over. Those who include keywords too often will have their sites marked out as "spam". However, if your target keyword does not appear regularly enough, its ranking will not be as high as it could. The algorithms have become particularly smart and as well as the keywords you want to target you should include other relevant keywords.

Using variations of a keyword is an excellent way to ensure that your site is viewed to be relevant. Variations are slight changes to your keyword. For example, variations of the keyword "film" include filming, films, etc.

URL Canonicalization

A recent issue with the Google:

“Canonicalization” it can be a problem for some websites ~ the webpage looks the same to the human viewer but to the search engine robot - they are different.

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same URLs:

http://EG.co.uk

http://www.EG.co.uk/

http://EG.co.uk/index.htm

http://www.EG.co.uk/index.html

Solution: Make sure that you only point links to the same url: www.eg.co.uk
Usually a 301 redirect resolves the problem with all the old pages.

Page Menu:
Optimising Content, Keyword optimisation,
Keyword Density, Header Tags, Text Formatting, Text Close to Top
Key Phrases , Alt Text, Incoming Links and SEO Tools.

Optimisation of TAGS

· Title-tag

· Meta-tags

· Header-tags (H1 tags)

· Image-alt-tags

· Formatting-tags

Weight is also given to keywords that are included in certain sections of a page. These sections include the title-tag, meta-tags (only relevant to smaller search engines now), header-tags, image-alt-tags and formatting-tags (e.g. keywords in bold or italicised) of your text. With image-alt-tags and hyperlink title-tags it is important that you don't simply fill these with keywords because this will be ignored at best and at worst penalised.

Never overemphasis keywords, again, this of the end user first, if is seems cluttered to a human, then the search engine algorithms will probably work that out mathematically.

Keyword Density

Your content should be made up of all of your keywords and other text. A total keyword density (all keywords) of around 15% to 20% is the maximum you should aim for and anything less than 5% is unlikely to yield good results. Density for a single keyword should be between 2% and 6%. 2% seems too low and 6% a little too high. If possible aim for approx 5% with the primary keyword and 2-3% with secondary and subsequent keywords.

Header Tags

Header Tags (e.g. H1 and H2 tags): More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, then H2, H3 and so on.

Example of a good content structure and Tags:

Keyword: Website Optimisation Tips, Website Optimisation Advise

Title Tag: Website Optimisation Tips and SEO Advice

Meta Description Tag: Place your target keywords near the front of a clear and click inviting sentence.

H1 Tag:

The 1^st heading on your page: Website Optimisation Tips and Advise
This should be followed by a short paragraph using variations of the target keywords and at all times making good grammatical sense, thinking of the potential reader first and the search engines second.

H2 Tag:

The 2^nd heading on your page: Website Optimisation Basics
Again followed by a short paragraph using variations of the target keywords, thinking of the potential reader first and the search engines second.

Another H2 Tag:

The 3^rd heading on your page: Website Optimisation Essentials

If possible using short sentence or even bullet point

Optimising Content, Keyword optimisation, URL Canonicalization
Optimisation of TAGS (title-tag, meta-tags, h1 header-tags, image-alt-tags and formatting-tags)
Keyword Density, Key Phrases , Alt Text, Incoming Links and SEO Tools.

Text Formatting

Text Formatting (e.g. strong, bold and underline): This may not offer much weight in algorithms, but generally if you bold the first instance of your keywords and the last instance of your primary keyword you should see some positive results.

Text Close to Top

The closer you can get your keywords to the beginning of your page (top left) the better. Try to include your primary keyword within the first few sentences and also within the last paragraph.

Key Phrases

If you are targeting "Property Investment" as a key phrase then do not split the words up if possible. Some effect is noticed if the words are split, but much more benefit is received by including the phrase as a whole.

Alt Text

Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image and gives some information.

Optimising Content, Keyword optimisation, URL Canonicalization
Optimisation of TAGS (title-tag, meta-tags, h1 header-tags, image-alt-tags and formatting-tags)
Keyword Density, Header Tags, Text Formatting, Text Close to Top and
Key Phrases .

Incoming Links

A better Google Page Rank (PR) will improve your search engine ranking, and thus deliver increased traffic to your site. Incoming links from other quality websites with PR4 and above should be your main target. If you don't have the Google Toolbar installed, you should definitely install it now - it will help you identify the websites and directories that will be the most beneficial to your own.

SEO Tools

For Meta Tags - www.scrubtheweb.com ***

For duplication checks - www.copyscape.com/ ****

For spamming checks - tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/ ***

For HTML error checks - validator.w3.org/ **

To see how a search engine views your website - gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go ****

More useful tools can be found at - www.iwebtool.com/ ****

Search Engine Optimisation News
PR to boost natural search popularity posted on 02/11/2006 14:34:26